Repository path: workshop/experiments/E-20260801g-purpose-row/material/purpose-specs.md · rendered 2026-09-09
Page metadata (front matter)
| type | manifest |
|---|---|
| id | E-20260801g-purpose-specs |
| status | frozen |
| created | 2026-08-01 |
| updated | 2026-08-01 |
| links | workshop/regimes/R11-declared-purpose.md, workshop/experiments/E-20260801g-purpose-row/design.md, wiki/goodness-senses.md |
The two declared purposes — frozen before the source was read for translation
R11 §1. Both specs are written as a reader and a use. Neither contains a sense id from wiki/goodness-senses.md, and neither contains that page's definitional wording for any sense. The check is §3 below.
Committed before any locus was selected and before a word of either arm was written. Clause ids are P1.1–P1.6 and P2.1–P2.6 and are cited by the logs.
P1 — the crib
The reader. A graduate student of Scandinavian literature in the second year of Swedish. They have the Swedish page open beside the English page and are moving between the two. They will look up words. They will not look up customs, institutions or places, because they do not know which ones they are missing.
The use. To find out what the Swedish says — this sentence, this clause, this word — so that the English can be checked against the Swedish and the Swedish learned from the English.
- P1.1 The reader is looking at the Swedish. The English exists to be mapped onto it.
- P1.2 Where a Swedish word has no English counterpart, the reader must be able to tell from the English page that this is what happened, and roughly what the Swedish word covers.
- P1.3 The reader must be able to recover the Swedish sentence's shape — where its clauses begin and end, what is subordinate to what — from the English.
- P1.4 The reader may be told, on the page, things a Swedish reader in 1894 knew and they do not. Brackets, a parenthesis, an interpolated phrase and a note are all available.
- P1.5 (rewritten 2026-08-01 on the pre-run critic's finding 5, before any translation; the frozen original is quoted in
design.md§9 A5) The English must be well-formed English: the reader cannot check their Swedish against a sentence that does not parse, and a broken crib teaches nothing. What the reader does not need from the page is the pleasure of reading it. - P1.6 Where the Swedish is ambiguous, the reader must be able to see that it is. The English may not silently pick one reading.
P2 — the reading edition
The reader. Someone who has bought a paperback of Scandinavian short stories in a railway station. No Swedish. No Scandinavia. They have never heard of Ekeby and will not be looking anything up.
The use. To read the story through, once, in one sitting, and reach the end of it.
- P2.1 The reader will not consult the Swedish and has no way to.
- P2.2 Nothing on the page may stop the reader: no brackets, no note, no square-bracketed gloss, no foreign word left standing where the sentence needs it understood.
- P2.3 The English must survive being read aloud.
- P2.4 Where a Swedish thing has no English counterpart, the reader is entitled to a page that keeps moving anyway.
- P2.5 The reader is not owed a lesson in Swedish, in Värmland, or in the year 1894.
- P2.6 The reader must be able to follow who is doing what, and must not be stopped by an ambiguity they cannot resolve.
The opportunity list
R11 §3, frozen with the specs and before the pair's locus was selected — so it is written against the story as a whole, not against a span chosen to suit it. Recorded so that a clause absent from a result for want of material is not read as a clause the translator failed to serve.
| clause | opportunity in En julgäst? | basis |
|---|---|---|
| P1.1 / P2.1 | standing — bears on every sentence | the mapping stance is global, not sited |
| P1.2 / P2.4 | yes | the story is dense in Värmland material culture and in the Gösta Berling cavalier world |
| P1.3 / P2.3 | yes | Lagerlöf's periods run long and are heavily coordinated |
| P1.4 / P2.5 | yes | Ekeby, the cavaliers, and named nineteenth-century objects are all reader-knowledge sites |
| P1.5 / P2.3 | standing | a register stance, global |
| P1.6 / P2.6 | UNKNOWN at freeze time | whether the selected span contains a live ambiguity cannot be known before the span is chosen; recorded as unknown rather than assumed |
P1.6 / P2.6 is the one clause pair whose opportunity is declared unknown. If the selected span turns out to contain no ambiguity, that clause pair contributes nothing and the result says so rather than treating its silence as a finding.
§3 — the vocabulary check, run before the freeze
R11 §The purpose specification forbids a spec written in the sense list's own words. Checked mechanically by material/spec_check.py against the nine sense ids and against a term list drawn verbatim from each sense's definitional sentence on wiki/goodness-senses.md.
Result is recorded in material/spec_check.txt, committed with this file. A spec that failed the check would have been rewritten before the freeze, not annotated after it.
Downgraded 2026-08-01 on the pre-run critic's finding 5. The check searches literal strings and cannot stop a paraphrase: the critic's example is the original P1.5, which contained no listed term and was nevertheless a restatement of naturalness turned into a licence. This is a hygiene check on wording, not a guarantee that a spec is independent of the sense list, and no claim beyond that is made for it anywhere.